Review: Miami Art Museum Ventures into "The Wilderness"

Anchoring "The Wilderness," Miami Art Museum's provocative group exhibit, is McCollum's sprawling installation, The Event: Petrified Lightning From Central Florida (With Supplemental Didactics) (1998), which takes over the center gallery. To create his jaw-dropping opus, the New York-based artist teamed up with geologists and electrical engineers from the University of Florida's International Center for Lightning Research and Testing during several weeks in the summer of 1997.

At the facility -- called Camp Blanding, located near the small town of Starke, considered the lightning capital of the world -- McCollum and his collaborators used small rockets to trigger lightning strikes. Their missiles had copper wires attached, directing the lightning bolts to containers filled with sand. When lightning zapped the wires, the jolt vaporized the sand, creating a small glass object called a fulgurite.